


just a dead man walking tonight

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: tell my father (this is my life) [5]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Character, Body Horror, Character Study, Five's body is a hard thing to process, Gen, Kinda, No Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Self-Harm, Sibling Bonding, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Diego Hargreeves, Trans Male Character, a lot of the really triggering shit is in the 2nd chapter, does major character death count, except for the one that Five lived through originally, healing process, holy shit Five's got some mental health issues, i am personally offended that no one has written Five&Allison bonding, i stan (1) time-travelling idiot, if five's mentioning the apocalypse deaths of all of his siblings?, it's a whole lot of shit, usual NO INCEST tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-06 15:52:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17942669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: They say that isolation is one of the quickest ways to turn a person insane, and in certain ways Five relates a bit too closely to Vanya and Klaus’ childhood imprisonments. He wasn’t trapped in a single prison, a basement cell or a mausoleum, but rather the entire world was his cell. He was the only person alive in the entire world, entirely alone besides Delores.Five sometimes wonders if he went insane, all alone in that giant prison.(Other times, he knows he did.)-This body isn't right. It’s too small, too soft, the palms uncalloused and the face too smooth. That scar he got from killing Louis XVII is gone from his knee, the chunk taken out of his ear during his seventh year in the Apocalypse fully healed. He carries no marks of his years of experience.He sometimes wonders if all the scars he’s gathered since he ended up in this young body constitute some insane attempt at recreating the scars he lost. The shrapnel, the alcohol binges, the gunshot- he knows he was more reckless than usual in his self-imposed mission.(But some part of him wanted to reclaim some measure of experience on this body, to turn this child-like vessel into something approaching the weapon it used to be.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Youngblood" by Five Seconds of Summer.
> 
> A little later in the day than my usual posts, but a bit longer too, so take the good with the bad, right?
> 
> Just a note- Diego being trans has been a thing for this entire series, but it hasn't been an important plot point until Five comes along, with his base of reference for his siblings being age thirteen. The rest of the siblings accepted his gender identity so long ago that they don't even think about it anymore, thus not necessitating any mention of it before Diego and Five's stories. Make sense? Good.
> 
> Also, quick note on Five's mental state. There are references to self-harm (though he doesn't necessarily process it as such), body dysmorphia from the whole stuck-in-the-body-of-a-child thing, and very unhealthy coping methods for dealing with PTSD. Any of this triggers you, please don't read for your own health. Otherwise, please enjoy!

_It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane._

**\- Philip K. Dick**

 

Five remembers all the books he read over his years stuck in the apocalypse. _The Chronicles of Narnia_ is one that sticks with him, now- specifically the final chapter of _the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ , where the Pevensies ended up trapped in their childhood bodies again after having lived twenty years in Narnia. He wonders if they felt as off in their bodies as he does in this child-like one.

Five's bones don't feel like his own. He is fifty eight years of experience and blood and heartache and loss shoved into the body of a child.

This body isn't _right_. It’s too small, too soft, the palms uncalloused and the face too smooth. That scar he got from killing Louis XVII is gone from his knee, the chunk taken out of his ear during his seventh year in the Apocalypse fully healed. He carries no marks of his years of experience.

He sometimes wonders if all the scars he’s gathered since he ended up in this young body constitute some insane attempt at recreating the scars he lost. The shrapnel, the alcohol binges, the gunshot - he knows he was more reckless than usual in his self-imposed mission.

(But some part of him wanted to reclaim some measure of experience on this body, to turn this child-like vessel into something approaching the weapon it used to be.) 

-

They say that isolation is one of the quickest ways to turn a person insane, and in certain ways Five relates a bit too closely to Vanya and Klaus’ childhood imprisonments. He wasn’t trapped in a single prison, a basement cell or a mausoleum, but rather the entire world was his cell. He was the only person alive in the entire world, entirely alone besides Delores.

Five sometimes wonders if he went insane, all alone in that giant prison.

(Other times, he knows he did.)

-

Now, in the modern day, the Apocalypse has been averted. With a hug and a push from the ghost of his brother, they got Vanya out of the basement cell and averted the greatest disaster in human history. Five's forty-five year quest is over.

And doesn't that just throw him the fuck off-center?

In some ways, Klaus was right when he diagnosed Five with an addiction. Forty-five years with only a singular goal tends to breed addiction in the brain, and _damn_ is his withdrawal hell.

He finds himself struck with a sense of perpetual aimlessness. Without a mission to guide him, without a goal in mind, he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, no real motivation.

Five saw the end of everything when he was only thirteen-years-old, but from the very first day he had the goal to stop what happened. He didn’t know how he’d do it, but he knew he would complete that mission. For forty years, he wasn't even entirely a man- he was a weapon with a single goal in mind.

Now, he has an entire life ahead of him, with the family he hasn’t known whatsoever. His siblings are alive. He has become so accustomed to death and destruction that life itself is honestly more shocking to him nowadays.

When the Apocalypse was on the line, he didn’t have much time or motivation to bond with his siblings. But now that the crisis has been averted, that he no longer has a mission to uphold, he just kinda wants to learn about his family again, to get to know the people he spend four decades trying to save.

-

Five often wakes up with a scream trapped in his teeth, blood staining his vision.

He knows that Vanya and Klaus sometimes sleep curled up together, keeping the nightmares at bay.

Five, on the other hand, returned Dolores to her shopping mall the day before the Apocalypse originally was supposed to happen, and now he has no one left to sleep with. He falls asleep and he dreams of empty wastelands and the screams of the people he's murdered, except this time they're not Marks- he’s pulling the trigger on his siblings, putting their dead bodies into the ruin of the world. He’s the one killing them, the one leading to their deaths.

Five is very much a hardened fifty-year-old man, but in some ways he is still that thirteen-year-old boy who happened upon the bodies of his siblings in their adult form, had to swallow back the horror at realizing what happened to his family.

He never had the chance to deal properly, to grow up in any sort of normal way. He is, emotionally, something beyond time and age, emotionally stunted and hardened at the same time. No socialization after age thirteen save that of a mannequin and eventually the Handler can do some massively traumatizing things to a person's psyche.

(In some ways, Five is just as separated from his siblings as Vanya was, as stunted as Luther or Diego, as divorced from reality as Allison, as scarred by war-torn dreams as Klaus, as touch-starved as Ben. He is nearly double their age and yet half them as well.)

-

They go bowling. It’s certainly not something Five ever would have suggested, but to be honest he’s not sure that any of them are particularly passionate about it, either. However, it does make for good neutral territory and a healthy outlet for competitive energy. They take up two lanes, with Allison, Dave, Luther, and Diego on one lane and Vanya, Ben, Klaus, and Five on the other.

It's honestly kind of fun, the utter competition half of them summon up. Luther and Diego compete, constantly riling each other up, while Five verbally pokes at both of them, Klaus eggs them on, Ben eats as many nacho fries as he can find, Allison watches in amusement, and Vanya quietly shows both of them up.

And all the while, Five watches with a scientist's eye. He tries to soak in as much information about his siblings as he possibly can.

Klaus and Dave can't seem to keep their hands off each other, their hands constantly brushing each others' arms and shoulders and backs. They sit on the bench by the lane with their sides pressed up against each other, and to all the world they look like any normal gay couple, not like a time travelling necromancer and his dead boyfriend from '69.

Allison watches all of them like a proud mother, which of course, she is. Five knows that they're just waiting for her throat to heal a bit more to go visit her daughter- his niece. He has a niece, isn't that an interesting development?

Luther, to be honest, really seems to be enjoying himself. His ape body is a bit awkward, but the sheer force of his throws tends to give him strikes, which allows him to keep up with Diego and, surprisingly, Vanya.

Five notes that nearly all of Vanya's balls give her spares, sometimes incredibly complicated ones that involve a 7-10 split. It only takes him a turn or two to realize, , with a certain pride, that she is humming a tune from Phantom of the Opera under her breath, thus converting the sound into precision telekinesis. Not a bad trick, especially considering how Diego's using his curving ability and Luther his super strength.

Ben is mostly quiet, but he can't seem to stop physically interacting with them all- high-fiving, hugging, shaking hands. He seems to be taking a lot of joy in being able to interact with them, which is understandable to Five. After all, from what he understands, Ben hasn't been able to even talk to them for the six years since he died.

(Five tries not to see himself in Ben's isolation, too, in the way he craves physical interaction with his siblings.) 

And Diego? Diego, well, he’s an interesting case, and most of Five's thoughts toward him have little to do with his bowling ability and more to do with how Five processes Diego mentally.

Diego had only come out a few months before Five disappeared, and though he’s unmistakably a man now, Five keeps fucking up in his own brain and misgendering the poor guy in his mind. He needs to get better at that, he recognizes.

Five knows what he's good at. He's a brilliant marksman, mathematician, driver, assassin, scientist, survivalist, and speed-reader. His powers are well-honed and he's plenty skilled at what the mechanical aspects of what he does.

But when it comes to communicating with others, to being able to interact normally with people? He keeps fucking up. Years of isolation have kind of fucked with his interpersonal skills. He's blunt to a fault and he keeps missing important cues.

Five really does love his siblings, for what it's worth. He spent forty years where his only motivation was to save them. He wants to get to know them in this time, to get to learn about how they've grown and who and what they love. He wants to know them better, to learn about everything he's missed.

He wants a fucking family. Is that too much to ask? 

-

That night, he gets shit-faced drunk.

(Let it not be said that Five has developed healthy coping skills. He tore apart time itself, killed dozens of people, just to save his family. Five is not a man who knows how to take things at a healthy pace, not a man who knows how to tell himself 'stop.')

He doesn't have Dolores anymore to help balance him out. She's back where she belongs, in that mall he found her in. He really hopes that that retail worker out her in that sequined dress that she wanted.

Five sighs into another swallow of his vodka. Dad was a shitty man, but at least he had good taste in alcohol. 

Five named her, you know? He never named himself, clinging to some remnant of his family, but he named _her_. Dolores- Spanish for  _pain._ For  _grief._ He named her after his family too, in a way.

Five clings. He clings to the memories of the Apocalypse like he used to cling to memories of his family. He remembers everything, every death, every empty street, and he can't let go. He doesn't know how to let go, how to be normal again.

Fuck, he's fucked up. He doesn't know how to make the world make sense again. He's just a too-old brain in a too-young body.

Vodka sounds like a  _really_ good idea right now. 

Diego finds him curled up on the floor of the laundry room, tucked into a back hallway on the third floor of the mansion with a bottle of vodka tucked between his knees. 

Diego crouches down next to Five, who looks up at him with bleary eyes. "Listen, man," Diego says, "I get it. You want to block it all out. But you can't do it this way. You may be fifty eight years old, but your body's only thirteen. You're gonna stunt your brain growth if you drink like this."

"And what does it matter?" Five asks. Because he doesn't have a mission anymore, or a future, or a past. Dolores is gone and he doesn't know how to be anything but a weapon, much less a functioning human person. "Even this drunk, I'm still more functional than any of you idiots. I could still fucking shoot you dead like this." 

"If you did," Diego says, prying the bottle from Five's hands, "I'd just get Klaus to let me haunt you."

Five hums, not really resisting Diego. What's the point, after all? "Good point."

"I often have them," Diego says, and Five stares up at Diego.

Everything about Diego is unmistakably masculine. Looking straight at him, Five almost never thinks of him in the wrong terms. But when he thinks about Diego, about their childhood, about the fact that Five used to have three sisters- that's when his thoughts get fucked up. His brain forgets, sometimes, who Diego really is, the gender that matters.

"I'm sorry," Five mutters, and Diego's eyebrow shoots up.

"About what?"

"I don't think about you right, sometimes," Five says, tapping his temple. "My brain forgets that you're not..." He sighs. "Nevermind. Not important."

Diego, just like Five, has never been able to let things go. "I came out right before you left, didn't I?" Five nods, and Diego sighs. "I don't like being misgendered, but I get your fucked up memories. As long as you're trying, that's what matters."

"For what it's worth," Five says, "When I'm looking at you, I can't forget. You're definitely a guy."

Diego gives him a crooked smile. "Thanks." Then he offers Five a hand. "Now, let's get you some water and a bed, why don't we?" Diego offers, and for once in his far too long life, Five doesn't argue. He just nods and lets Diego help him up and to his room. 

-

Five dreams of blood and of fire, of the whole damn world burning around his head and he just keeps running and running as his siblings scream and die around him-

He wakes up a few nights later to a hand on his shoulder. His first reaction is to lash out, to fling out his elbow into the fleshy gut of whoever's attacking him, but a gentle hand on his arm stops him.

"It's okay," Allison says, her voice all raspy, all wrong, and he blinks up at her.

He scowls. "I don't need you to baby me."

Allison rolls her eyes. "I'm not babying you. I know you're fifty eight and all, but I also know that there's a bunch of shit you haven't dealt with yet," Allison says.

"Pot meet kettle," he bites out, and he can't decide if he regrets it or not. Allison  _is_ just trying to help him, after all.

Allison doesn't flinch, though. "And I'm here for you, okay? We're all fucked up in our own ways, and we're all here for each other." She smirks. "I know you hate it, but we _do_ know some of what you're going through. We can help you, if you don't let your pride get in the way."

Five sits up, and he's so small, only half her height, but they have the same birthday. They're siblings through and through. He has to start learning to let people in, not blocking them off to maintain some semblance of the life he lived in the Apocalypse.

(Fuck, this isn't gonna be easy. But it might just be healthy- not that he's sure he'd be able to recognize healthy thoughts from a mile away, but the point still stands.)

"You want a sandwich?" he asks, and he's offering far more than a sandwich.

Allison smiles, and he knows that she knows what he's saying. "Of course," she says, letting go of his arm. "Coffee, too?"

He sneers. "I can't get a good fucking coffee around here."

Her smile sharpens. "We can go to that donut shop 'round the corner."

Five snorts. "I'm pretty sure we're gonna have to pick a new one. I have it on reliable authority that that particular donut shop is out of business."

Allison's eyes widen slightly but nods. "Alright, then. You got a suggestion?"

"A few," Five says, and holds out his hand to her. She looks at it with a raised eyebrow. "We can just jump there."

"In your pjs?" is Allison's only question.

Five looks her over- she herself is in a pair of flannel pj bottoms and a long-sleeved t-shirt that he's pretty sure is merchandise from one of her movies, but he can't be certain. He's never gotten to see any of them, after all- electricity and DVD players were hard to come by in the Apocalypse. "Why not?" he asks, arching a challenging eyebrow, and she shrugs.

"Alright, you've got a point. Just lemme grab a pair of sandals and a hoodie and we'll go." She slides off the bed and runs to the door, and Five just stares after her. This isn't exactly what he had planned for the night, but it's certainly not the worst thing he could be doing.

Ten minutes later, Five finds himself in a small cafe with his sister, a small smile on his lips as she tells him about her daughter.

Maybe Five can do this whole sibling thing better than he thinks.

-

The next night, Five finds himself not with a bottle of alcohol or a gun and a target but with two siblings in a booth with him at a local Bob Evans'. He, Diego, and Allison pig out on late-night breakfast food and stupidly synthetic but nostalgic-tasting mac n' cheese. 

They talk about everything and nothing, from Allison's movies to favorite foods to Claire to the future to Dolores to some of the sightseeing Five did on his time-travelling missions to the stock market to their somehow shared love of classic American romance novels. It's probably the best possible activity for the three of them to get to know each other, to bond better.

And sure, the conversation sometimes slows because of Allison's voice or because they've hit a bad memory for Diego or Five, but that comes with the territory. Even if Allison and Diego are better adjusted than he is, none of them are  _well_ -adjusted.

But the conversations are getting better. The three of them come back to the diner every few days, Luther even eventually getting in on things after a week and a half. Five is starting to understand his siblings a little better, is learning to let go of the Apocalypse and growing to understand the present. He's not Good, necessarily, but he's getting better.

-

They arrive in L.A. and it's nothing like the L.A. of the 1930s or the L.A. of the the Apocalypse- it's almost absurdly normal, the suburb that Claire and Brian live in.

They arrive at Allison's place and she starts to nervously pace as they get changed from airplane-clothes into something more presentable for Claire.

And Five decides to help her out a little. He's still not entirely certain on this whole "comfort" thing, but he's going to try his best.

"Everything's gonna be alright," Five says, placing a hand on her lower arm. "We all love her already and we've gotten better with our people skills lately."

Diego snorts. "You mean  _you've_ gotten better with your people skills.

Five rolls his eyes. "Don't deny you've done it too, mama's boy."

"Oh, fuck off," Diego says, but they've done the job. Allison's smiling and her shoulders seem a bit less tense.

Five's thoughts shift. Maybe he has a new mission, now: instead of saving his family, he's going to do his best to make them happy. He's going to help them out, make them comfortable and help them work out their shit too.

Yeah, that seems like a pretty good idea.

-

It’s inevitable that shit’s gonna hit the fan. They’re the Hargreeves. Vanya nearly caused the Apocalypse, Five was a legendary time-travelling hitman, Klaus is dating a man who’s been dead for forty years, Luther spent four years alone on the moon, Allison created an entire world around her own ambition using only her words, Diego is still a dagger-wielding superhero to this day, and Ben has literal monsters under his skin. Their family doesn’t do normal.

So when Cha-Cha and her new partner, a guy originally based in the 1800s named Jack, come tearing after them, it’s not a shock. It’s unpleasant, sure, and all hell breaks loose for a little while, but it's not a disaster.

This time around, it’s not just Five or even Diego going up against the two assassins. This time, they have Vanya’s powers and Five's expertise and then Klaus' hands glow, and they have Ben's monsters back as well.

Cha-Cha doesn't know what hits her.


	2. the first time around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five and the sounds of a dead world.
> 
>  
> 
> (Prologue to the series.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Definitely rated M, for suicidal thoughts, gore, and the like. Much less fluff than the rest of the story. This is what i get for reading Hunger Games fanfic.

Five doesn't bury his siblings. He doesn't have to- they are already half-buried by rubble, and he is only thirteen. He doesn't have Luther's super strength, and at first he doesn't bury them because he physically  _can't_.

Instead, he leaves the mansion in search of answers.

The world is wide enough that he only has to get used to the stench of rotting flesh when he returns home, to those unburied, rotting bodies.

For forty years, he wanders the earth, trying to find a way back home, and once a year, every year, he finds himself back at the mansion, in front of his siblings' dead bodies.

It's never the same day each year. He counts and counts the days, marking a small scratch on his arm with each passing day, and he knows he visits once every three-hundred-and-fifty-first day.

Soon, his arms are full of scars. They feel like absolution, some kind of reclamation, some way of grieving. (They feel like a way to make himself hurt half as much as they did, a way to make up for the survivors' guilt.)

In a world where everything is dead or dying, Five can't plant flowers for his siblings. He's not sure what's keeping him alive, without the oxygen, but he's alive and they're not and so he keeps going.

Five gets used to the scent of rotting flesh, to the way his siblings' bodies decay. He keeps returning until all there is left of his siblings is their bones, yellowing away in the sun. He still doesn't bury their bodies, decades into his search for a way to undo things. He keeps their bodies as a reminder of what he has to stop.

-

Five thinks, sometimes, about the bodies that await him at the mansion. Some of them were easily identifiable- Allison easiest, and then he thinks he pinned Diego correctly. The half-ape body was probably Luther, if only because he would never be caught dead in a skirt like the other corpse.

Five never finds Vanya. He never finds Ben. 

He does, however, find Ben's statue, half-broken on the ground, and reads the inscription. He reads Vanya's book, too, and he realizes that Ben died years before the others did, six years in fact. He realizes that his brother's death had nothing to do with the Apocalypse, that he died on just an ordinary mission, him and Luther.

But Five never discovers what happened to Vanya. Her book is the only evidence of what happened to her, and it's dated five years before the Apocalypse. He can't determine much of anything of her fate from that.

And so he spends years wandering and wondering what happened.

- 

Five is alone, with only Delores beside him, and he knows he's going quietly mad but he doesn't care. He has one mission, and that's to save his siblings and prevent the Apocalypse. Him surviving is necessary for that end, and he's gonna make it happen.

(He sometimes thinks about blowing his brains out, on the nights when the sheer emptiness of the world seems to stretch forever and ever without end, but he knows he can't. He has to save his family.

There's just no other option.)

-

Five tries to cling to the memories he has of his family, good and bad.

He remembers Mom, about the way she tucked him in as child, about the way she always smiled and always cared about them all. He remembers the way she would never say a single bad word about them, no matter how bad they fucked up.

His three brothers and three sisters- no, four brothers and two sisters, stop misgendering, stop _forgetting_ \- eating dinner together, training together, crying together. These are the memories that always surface first, this tense sense of togetherness.

The problem is that soon enough, he can only remember the grand concepts, the impressions of his siblings rather than the exact details. The quiet of Vanya, the crooked smile of Allison, the strict tone of Luther, the curve of Diego's throwing arm, the manic flair of Klaus, the gentleness of Ben, the kindness of Mom. 

And of Dad? Well, Five has no good memories. He doesn't care about the man one way or another.

(Fiuve never finds his father's body, and he can never bring himself to give a fuck.)

-

Five goes through puberty. His voice drops, he starts to grow a beard, and, well...

He never really gets wet dreams, and he can't be too irritated by it. By age twenty two, he's pretty damn certain that he's asexual. His interest in Delores has always been for her mind, independent of her lack of body.

His dreams never turn to sex. Instead, he dreams of his sibings and the world he once lived in, a world where his siblings are alive and so are plants and there were sounds other than the crunch of his heels and the drifting wind.

Five stops dreaming of purple and green. He doesn't remember what the colors look like, after all. Instead, his dreams are stained with orange and black and gray and brown, the colors of the Apocalypse around him.

(The only reason Five remembers the color blue is because Delores' painted-on eyes are blue. As the years pass and the color flakes off, as the fabric of his uniform fades, he even forgets blue.)

-

For forty years, he wanders and plots and marches. He deals with puberty and desolation and eternal aloneness by thinking of his siblings. He flips through the pages of Vanya's book so often that the words start to fade, and he survives off of cockroaches and canned food and twinkies.

The fifty-third year of his life in the Apocalypse, he returns back to the mansion. His siblings' skeletons are still there, though nearly turned to dust by this point.

And then, somehow, a woman steps through the ruined front arch of the mansion and towards him.

(For forty years, there has been no one, no thing. Nothing has been alive save himself.

And now, there is this woman, with silver hair and a black coat and heels just like Mom's. There is life, impossible though it seems.)

"I have a job offer for you," the woman says, mouth stained by the color of blood, and Five is just insane enough to say yes. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please leave kudos/comments if you liked! Comments motivate and sometimes even inspire more stories in the series.


End file.
